22WRMC

Pre-Conference Session - Additional Cost $800 
Whether your program is small or large, wilderness based, or study abroad, you have the responsibility to your staff and participants to invest in risk management planning. Building a comprehensive risk management plan can feel daunting. Our goal is to provide you a structured approach and tools to build a risk management plan appropriate for your organization. We've spent more than 50 years managing risk in wilderness environments around the world, and we're always learning. Join us to connect and share your valuable experience with peer programs, and let us share our experience and lessons learned with you.

Heat injury can occur any time in any outdoor activity. If left unchecked, heat injuries can escalate quickly and result in emergencies. How can we be prepared to prevent and respond to them? Look at how one organisation learnt from a heat injury near miss and adopted a systemic approach to heat injury management.

In this workshop participants will review commonly unmet or misunderstood AEE accreditation standards in the areas of program oversight/management of activities, human resources, transportation, equipment/nutrition/hygiene, and activity specific standards and use these trends to improve the organizations they work in.

As a result of the pandemic, organizational Duty of Care has evolved and status-quo is no longer acceptable to stakeholders. In this session, we’ll highlight four opportunities that emerged from our industry’s shared challenges that can create growth opportunities and improve risk management systems throughout travel programs. This educational session aims to create dialogue and challenge traditional methodologies to improve staff training, client engagement, and industry collaboration.

• Since the Civil Rights Act of 1963, employees have been able to recover damages for unlawful discrimination. Since the murder of George Floyd, employers have sharpened their work and efforts around strengthening diversity, equity, and inclusion in the work-place. This work, important and long overdue, has complicated discrimination claims against employers. This presentation will highlight these complexities and how they are impacting discrimination claims and the handling of those claim, both internally and externally.

Given the prevalence of sexual misconduct claims, it is imperative for organizations to understand the legal and operational challenges these incidents present. During this session, you’ll learn about proactive and reactive processes implemented from legal and program experts. Speakers will provide key tips for operators on employee screening and training, vendor vetting, insurance, company policy, mandatory reporting, and incident response. Note: this session examines a real-life case study to highlight key takeaways of presented material.

Field Accidents; Sexual Misconduct; Vehicle Accidents; Medical Malpractice - what do these exposures have in common? If not managed properly, an incident involving any of these can quickly lead an organization into a deep financial and legal quagmire. Are you confident that your insurance policies will protect your organization's assets and reputation from these risks appropriately? Also, do you understand what is required of you, the insured, to trigger coverage? Attendees of this session will participate in a guided discussion where we will use possible risk scenarios like the ones outlined to explore the complexities of managing incident response. The outcome will allow you to walk away with an essential structure for a well-rounded insurance program. 

A number of outdoor enthusiasts as well as rurally based facilities are encountering bears at an increasing rate. Knowing how to respect these creatures in their habitat is essential for the safety of humans and bears.

Learning Objectives:
1. Understand the unique physical characteristics and behaviors of the most common bear species.
2. Describe interventions that can prevent negative human-bear interventions.
3. Identify factors relating to climate change that impact bear habitats and behaviors.

This session is going to be VERY interactive! We are going to – literally – take the various pieces of running a good quality and defensible recreation program and put them together like a puzzle. We want to look at things like: structural issues (LLC or Inc?), insurance (do you know the various types you need?), staffing and the role of counsel (should you have a lawyer?), the various defenses that recreation providers rely on and how those defenses are put together in day-to-day entity practices so they can be expressed in trial or dispute resolution (do you know what assumption of the risk IS and how your entity can put it to use or rely on it?), how are you contracting with other entities that contribute to your product/activity (do you have a transport company, do you outsource food preparation and are these entities under contract and do you have a COI from them?), and we want to understand the nuances of your exact activity in the context of your geographic region (has your state or federal district spoken about releases or are there industry standards that you should be conforming to in your activity or area?). We want to go deeper than the primer sessions and take a look at overall health of a recreation organization/entity and give attendees a good overview that will spark them to look at best management practices at several levels of their organization and how it all coordinates into a quality and defensible program. Participants need to be aware of – and comfortable with - the fact that there is no list or cookbook that fits each entity. Nurturing your program or entity means looking at and becoming familiar with the several ‘layers’ and approaches that each entity should be looking at – IE – what are the office people doing vs. the field staff and how do those roles coalesce? Have the office staff created appropriate forms and data collection systems that reflect what the field staff are accomplishing? How does each level of the entity accomplish hazard recognition? It’s time to take the plunge and have a comprehensive overview of what your whole entity/program and its various parts should look like to see if the entire entity is functioning at its best. This is the end game of risk management and is intended to engage everything you have learned up to this point at WRMC.